


The Woods Are Deep, My Dear

by Azzandra



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Giant Spiders, Kid Fic, Teodora Lives AU, as a witchy old woman in the woods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2019-08-24 14:24:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: One day, Barry shows up on Teodora's doorstep with a small child. And a child can do worse than being raised by her grandmother, who people may or may not assume is some kind of witch.





	1. Making Room

Teodora never expected either of her sons to ever darken her doorstep again, but when Barry showed up, tired and paranoid and his arms full of sleeping child, she couldn't turn him away any more than she could rip her own heart out.

She'd thought herself safely ensconced in anonymity out there, straddling the treeline where the town's outskirts turned into Wastelands, but though she had bowed out gracefully and never contacted her sons again, it made sense, somehow, that they'd known where she was this entire time, and had not intruded on her. Perhaps they'd even kept purposefully away, respectful or her space, or maybe too awkward to confront her after she'd killed their father. They had loved him, in their own way. Even _she_ had loved Saturn on some days. 

She herded Barry towards the bed, pulled his boots off, bundled him under the covers, and soon it was just her and the child, looking at her with large, curious eyes.

The girl's name was Agatha, Barry had said. And Agatha was fascinated, at the moment, with the jars occupying the rows of shelves against a wall.

"Would you like to learn what they are?" Teodora asked softly, as to not wake Barry. 

Her house did not have rooms, as such. A bed was pushed up against the hearth, a table across from it that Teodora ostensibly thought of as the kitchen table, a few mismatched chairs scattered about, most of them piled with books or notes or clothing. There were the shelves and cabinets lining the walls, and from the rafters hung bundles of dried herbs, each one labeled, and each label with running ink that only Teodora could read anymore. There was one large, cushioned chair that Teodora considered her reading chair, with a matching cushioned stool for her feet.

To Agatha, the cluttered shelves seemed to hold a sort of fascination. Teodora took off jars one by one, bringing them down to Agatha's eye level and explaining the contents in a soft murmur. Sometimes she opened one or another, whichever she knew to be safe, and let Agatha smell or touch as well.

It was growing dark when Agatha grew tired of this, and gave a jaw-popping yawn. It was likely close to her bed time. She couldn't be older than six.

Teodora made a light dinner for Agatha, a fried egg over a slice of sheep cheese, and despite being a bit uncoordinated with the cutlery, Agatha ate until the plate was scraped clean.

"Would you like to sleep on top of the hearth?" Teodora asked, mindful of the fact that Barry had still not woken up. The bed was large enough to fit two, especially when one was a small child, but she didn't want to wake him.

Either way, Agatha nodded eagerly, and Teodora placed a chair next to the hearth, and boosted Agatha up to the alcove above it. There was a soft animal pelt for a mattress, a stack of blankets that Teodora stored there when she wasn't using them, and the spare pillows. She instructed Agatha to take off the coverlet and pick a pillow from the pile, and then she made sure Agatha was tucked in safe.

The hearth was still warm from the fire she'd used to make dinner, and Teodora could see Agatha tracing her hands over the clay tiles of the hearth, outlining the geometric floral motifs on them. She knew Agatha had fallen asleep when the tiny chubby hand fell down next to Agatha's head, and there was nothing but stillness from the alcove over the hearth.

Feeling weariness catch up with her, Teodora went to her reading chair, and sat down heavily among its cushions.

"Oh, Barry, what's happening?" she asked without expecting an answer, and then fell asleep in the chair.

* * *

The nearby town was called Teeth. It was built among the jagged pillar remains of an old fortress--the eponymous 'teeth' in the town's name--and after patching up the walls, it had found itself safe enough from the hazards of the Wasteland to prosper. To the townsfolk, Teodora was known, neutrally, as 'the Russian', or in more fearful tones, as 'the witch on the outskirts'. Which still managed to be more respectful than 'the hag in the woods', which was what they called her when they really didn't think she was listening.

For the most part, Teodora enjoyed being ignored by them, or at least tolerated while she was not in sight. Sometimes, rarely, she went into town on market days if she desperately needed something she couldn't get herself, and when that happened at least her money was good.

More frequently, townsfolk would come to her. Not often, and when they did, they made sure not to be seen, but frequently it was girls or women who came.

Teodora had made a habit of harvesting Trusty Maiden's Weed from the woods around her cottage, though she did not use it herself. She did not sell it in town, either, instead keeping it for the worried-faced girls who came to see her. For the ones that were past the help of Maiden's Weed, she had other herbs, and other teas, and for the ones who came too late even for that... she'd picked up midwifery as well, though she would never let the girls drop the babe on her doorstep.

She received visits for other ailments, as well; embarrassing diseases that they did not like to show to the doctor in town, or chronic conditions that they were desperate enough to see a witch about. Often men were particularly terrified to see her, but then their wives or their sisters or their mothers would come instead, and ask Teodora for cures on their behalf.

The doctor in town came to see Teodora as well, once. He was a portly man, his demeanor gentle even as a disapproving frown pulled at his features. He was worried she was some sort of quack, Teodora knew, even though he did not state so outright. She served him tea at her kitchen table, and then they had a long discussion on medicine that smoothed out his brow. They ended up at her bookshelf, discussing the gaps in their medical libraries and arranging bookswaps.

It had been a calculated risk. Being known as a Spark could be nearly as dangerous as being known for a quack. A witch was a good piece of plausible deniability, but it came with its own risks. There was no version in which Teodora wasn't an outsider, and there were times when she felt how tenuous her position was, and how easily trust could be taken away.

She was an outsider to them, and in the Wastelands, where towns built their walls strong and mistrusted anything that came shambling out of the unknown, Teodora knew the town's mood could turn against her fast. She would not rely on their goodwill, and some years...

Some years she relied on it even less than others. Some years she could tell: a failed crop, a suspicious miscarriage, a rain of spoons, and the paranoia ratcheted high in town. She could tell, just by their burning gazes, when they'd had discussions about whether the 'witch' might be responsible for their misfortunes.

So no, she did not trust or rely on the townsfolk more than she had to.

She depended on other people more: like the merchants who made their stop in Teeth, and made sure to hitch their wagons by her cottage if it was late and the gates were closed. They traded things to her, things that seemed odd to them, and useless, but that Teodora saw worth in. They came with news, and books, and they accepted things in trade that would be valuable sold in far away parts.

The other travelers: the roadshows, the grain wagons coming from fertile lowlands to sell their fare up in the mountains, the hunters, the lumberjacks. The wanderers, the runaways, the hunted and the hunters. Teodora was fond, in her own way, of all the itinerants who passed her door. And even then, she never once expected either of her sons to find their way to her.

* * *

Teodora was sitting on the stoop, watching Agatha acquaint herself with the chickens, when Barry finally woke up and staggered out. He leaned against the wall next to the door, not quite daring to sit down next to his mother.

It twisted at Teodora's heart, but she supposed it was inevitable. She'd raised her boys to know right from wrong, and she had left their lives as a murderer. No matter how much Saturn had deserved his fate, it did not make her any less guilty, and it did not make her boys any less justified in putting her aside.

Which made it all the more curious that Barry would seek her out, with his niece in tow.

They watched quietly as Agatha cautiously circled the rooster, Vasily, trying to pet him. He was a cantankerous old bird, a Transylvanian Naked Neck, with just a bit of tweaking. Teodora didn't have a dog, but Vasily served well enough, and even regular roosters could be viciously territorial; a construct one could be a downright menace to anything threatening his coop. He'd mauled his fair share of foxes over the years. He'd mauled some stranger things, as well. The Wastelands had found its match and gave Teodora's chickens a wide berth now.

Vasily didn't seem to have made his mind up about Agatha yet, though. He craned his head and clucked suspiciously, and his bare, red neck seemed to amuse Agatha, who'd never seen a chicken like this before. She approached with her arm extended, like people approaching a strange dog and letting it get a sniff, and she kept trying to pet Vasily's fluffy black tailfeathers. Vasily kept squirming away and circling around to avoid her touch.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't need to be," Barry said eventually, in answer to a question that was not asked.

Teodora's hands clenched in her knees; her jaw tightened.

"No, I don't mean it like--" Barry sighed, and began again. "Bill and I never wanted to burden you with our problems. We know getting away from Mechanicsburg must have... been a relief."

Teodora's shoulders slumped. Had they thought, this entire time, that getting away from her boys had been a relief to her as well? She felt tears misting up her vision, but kept her eyes carefully ahead, watching as Agatha plopped in the dirt to draw Vasily closer. The rooster refused to approach, but the other chickens were less cautious, and one hen sat in Agatha's lap, and accepted Agatha's petting.

"Despite how I left, you'll always be my sons," Teodora said carefully. "And Agatha... I'm thankful you allowed her to meet me."

He'd introduced Teodora to Agatha as her grandmother, and that was not something he was obligated to do. That was not something she'd even hoped he'd do. She could have been just an old woman in the woods to the girl, and Teodora wouldn't have minded. Barry had chosen differently.

"Of course she should meet you," Barry said, voice so fragile. He sighed heavily, and drooped down to sit on the stoop as well, a step lower than Teodora so they were at the same head height. "Mother... she's breaking though. I don't... I don't know what to do. I can't... it's dangerous, this can't happen."

Teodora's mind buzzed like a live wire, lit up with this new information. Agatha was so small, but breaking through already? That was indeed dangerous, and she wouldn't blame Barry for rightfully fearing such a thing, but she knew he wouldn't seek her out if all Barry feared was just the regular risks of a breakthrough this young.

"There are people after her," Teodora concluded.

"There are," Barry admitted grimly, his lips tightening into an unhappy line.

"People who do not know I am still alive?" Teodora asked.

"People who would have no idea you exist," Barry said, and hung his head.

* * *

Agatha did not seem all that concerned when Barry made his goodbyes. He promised to come back at some undefined moment in the future, and assured her she would be fine with her grandmother, but it was clear Agatha did not fully understand the situation, just by the cheerful way she asked for Barry to bring her something from his travels.

Instead, Agatha seemed taken with Teodora's cottage, and particularly looking forward to staying there. She liked sleeping on top of the hearth, claiming it like her own nook, and she spent a great deal of time asking Teodora about her chickens, and her books, and her herbs, all with the expansive curiosity one would expect of a precocious learner.

Teodora, for her part, fell back into child-rearing awkwardly. There was no tyrannical father looking to impart his bleak outlook onto the next generation this time, no disapproving townsfolk looking to sabotage every attempt at teaching righteous morals, and no ever-vigilant architecture to hear everything she said.

But she had not been a mother in so very long, and had had no time to prepare herself for being a grandmother. On the first day, she focused on nothing so much as the immediacy of the situation. She sorted out bedsheets and blankets for Agatha, made room in one of the small trunks for her clothing, and then brewed a dose of forest draught for her.

Agatha watched curiously as Teodora stirred the green-tinged liquid in a small cup. Its scent was like pine-syrup and mint, though it contained neither of those, and when Teodora passed the cup to Agatha, she scrunched her nose suspiciously.

"Is this medicine?" Agatha asked.

"Of a sort," Teodora said. "It changes your scent, so the beasts of the forests stay away from you."

"Like wolves?" Agatha asked, her suspicious frown smoothing out into curiosity.

"Wolves, bears, lynxes," Teodora confirmed, and though she hesitated for a moment, she added, "Other creatures that also roam the woods. Constructs. Monsters. Many stranger things."

Agatha made a curious sound, and sniffed the cup. Then, obediently, she drank it all. By the look on her face, it didn't taste nearly as bad as she'd expected. Teodora had sweetened it a bit for her.

She was glad Agatha hadn't protested, at least. Teodora did not care to confront the wild beasts in these parts, and did anything she could to avoid such confrontations. Her cottage was surrounded by a sturdy fence, built a bit unevenly and patched by her own hands, but she did not rely on the fence to keep her safe. She had other tricks for that, and the low-level emitters that she had embedded in the trees around her cottage did most of the work of keeping the beasts at bay. The forest draught was an added precaution, for when she needed to venture outside the radius of the emitters.

"Can I make a draught too?" Agatha asked, and pointed to Teodora's shelves, where she had her rows of jars and bottles with ingredients.

Teodora had a moment of apprehension; she didn't really think Agatha knew much chemistry, or even any herbology, but since she was a child in breakthrough, Teodora also had little doubt Agatha would give it the good old Spark try anyway the moment Teodora turned her back.

"I can show you how to make some simple things," Teodora suggested, and Agatha brightened at the offer.

The rest of the day was spent teaching Agatha, until it was dinnertime and Teodora put together a light repast, and then put Agatha to bed.

After Agatha was asleep, Teodora sat in her chair, sewing by lamplight since she'd not gotten around to this chore during the day. She was going to have to integrate Agatha into her routine, for the time being. There was no telling when Barry would get back, and by how vague he'd been, Teodora thought it might not be until spring.

* * *

Agatha was a sweet child, but energetic by nature, and like all intelligent children, prone to getting herself into trouble unless supervised. Teodora was starting to feel her age as she rounded a corner of her cottage and came around the back to see Agatha taking apart the food dispenser for the chicken coop.

Agatha froze, her arm halfway down a chute, while Vasily, perched on top of the coop, crowed mockingly; he seemed gleeful about the prospect of Agatha getting into trouble. The chickens, Lyuba, Galya and Kiralina, were clucking dubiously as they rubber-necked at whatever Agatha was doing.

Teodora controlled her face, and kept her voice neutral as she spoke.

"Agatha, what are you doing?" she asked.

"I... I wanted to see..." Agatha's demeanor grew uncertain, as if the thought was only just catching up with her. Had she been fuguing before Teodora interrupted?

"Let's put it back together, yes?" Teodora suggested. "The chickens will appreciate getting dinner on time."

"Uh-huh," Agatha agreed, growing cheerful at the suggestion. 

Teodora showed it how everything was meant to be put back together, and gave firm instructions for Agatha to never take anything apart before saying something first, and Agatha nodded, not quite looking at Teodora.

There was no helping it, Teodora thought, as she scrounged through old boxes for little bits and bobs. Agatha did not have any toys, and there was only so much entertainment she was going to derive from chasing the chickens around.

Teodora put together a small satchel of broken parts and tools she could spare, and cleared out half of a table for Agatha to work at. Agatha thanked her by throwing herself at Teodora and latching her arms around Teodora's waist--with surprising strength for such a small girl. Or maybe Teodora was just getting old and frail, but either way, she patted Agatha's head, warmed by the easy affection the girl bestowed upon her.

* * *

It was an overcast day, and the lamps were lit even though it was late morning. Teodora fed the fire in the hearth until it was at a steady roar, and set the pot on the stovetop to make borscht. Rain tapped against the shutters, counterpoint to the crackle of the fire, and Agatha lounged, somnolent, in Teodora's chair, with last year's copy of the Wastelands Almanach. At intervals, Teodora heard the dry whisper of paper as she turned a page.

By the time Teodora turned from her task back to Agatha, the girl had fallen asleep, curled in the chair, a quilt half-tangled around her legs.

Teodora found herself endeared by the sight, and approached quietly to adjust the quilt so it covered Agatha properly, and then she carefully tried to extricate the book from Agatha's grasp.

This last motion stirred Agatha to waking again, because her eyes blinked open and she looked up to Teodora with sleep still swimming in her face.

"When's Uncle Barry coming back?" Agatha asked, sounding younger than she was.

Teodora would have liked to say 'soon', or at least she would have liked a definite date to give. But she did not know.

"He'll be back as soon as he can," Teodora promised instead.

Agatha blinked again groggily, and then turned over to curl more comfortably, and fell back asleep.

Teodora rounded back to the kitchen table, cleaning up and puttering around the room with no real interest in anything, until she was startled by Vasily's loud crowing from outside. She knew that was the sound he made when someone was approaching the cottage, usually one of the townspeople.

She wondered who might be out in this weather, but she was hardly surprised. Sometimes people dropped in on her when they didn't think anybody was going to see them, and likely everybody in town was shuttered in for the day. She opened the door, peering out into the grayed out day. Lingering at her gate was an old woman from town. The rain was sliding off her rain coat, but the old woman shivered anyway, whether afraid or uncertain, and so Teodora gestured for her to approach.

"My Nechifor has the shakes," the woman explained without preamble, as she shook off her rain coat before stepping through the door. "The doctor told him he had to quit drinking 'fore his liver gave out, but he hasn't been coping well."

"He shouldn't be trying to quit all at once," Teodora spoke softly, mindful of Agatha still sleeping.

"Well, the doctor said that too, but Nechifor doesn't listen to a word anyone ever tells him," the old woman said, her tone turning sharp in exasperation. Before Teodora could warn the woman to keep her voice down, her eyes had already slid to something over Teodora's shoulder and widened in surprise.

Agatha was sitting up, rubbing her eyes as she observed the visitor.

"Hello," Agatha said, still a bit sleepy as she waved.

The old woman looked at Teodora askance.

"My granddaughter," Teodora said curtly. "She will be staying with me until her uncle comes to take her."

"Didn't know you had family," the old woman replied, her tone exceedingly dry.

"Ah. Did you ever ask?" Teodora retorted, and the woman sank into uncertain silence.

Nobody in town had ever cared much for Teodora's personal details, and she hadn't put forth any, but at the moment it would be just as well to establish that Agatha wasn't some child she'd nabbed. When one was known as the local witch, such assumptions unfortunately tended to happen.

As Teodora began picking through ingredients, Agatha hopped out of the chair and rushed to help. This consisted mostly of Teodora explaining what she was doing and what she was working with as she prepared something to alleviate the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.

The old woman twitched uncomfortably when Teodora went on an explanation of the addictive properties of alcohol, clearly uncomfortable with this sort of business being imparted to a small child, but beggars could hardly be choosers, and at any rate, Agatha was adorably focused on the scientific explanations more than the potential for gossip. Her face was bright and open as she listened and asked questions.

In minutes, the old woman was sent off with a bottle of medicine for her Nechifor--whether he was her husband or her son, Teodora hadn't bothered to ask.

As Teodora closed the door, cutting off the chill of the rainy day, Agatha tugged on her skirt.

"Grandma, when is Uncle Barry coming back?" Agatha asked.

Teodora paused, not quite liking the knot in her stomach that she got from this question being asked for the second time that day, but Agatha probably did not remember asking it the first time. She'd been half-awake.

"He'll come back as soon as he can," Teodora replied once again.

Agatha nodded, like that was the answer she expected, but Teodora sensed the question would return long before Barry did, and she did not like the thought.

 

* * *

 

There was a Kalderash band that passed through Teeth regularly. Their chieftain would always stop by Teodora's cottage first, bringing her a bottle of vodka and news from all around. They would sit by the fire or on her stoop, and Teodora would tell him the mood of the town, and the chieftain would decide whether to stop in Teeth or not.

Once or twice, she'd hesitated and equivocated enough that the chieftain's face had grown drawn, and he'd nodded thanks to her, and then he'd picked up the band and looped around the town, not stopping there.

But most years, they were good years, and the chieftain would grin and joke, and set camp just off Teodora's cottage.

They were tinkerers and tinsmiths, as far as the townsfolk knew. Every family in town had a pot made by the Kalderash, and swore by it, and it never occurred to them that the reason the thing could cook anything under the sun without sticking or burning was because it was Sparkwork.

Who would think of it as such? Sparks were madmen zapping corpses or commanding armies of clanks. They were not the quick-handed Kalderash, who didn't truck with academia, but could whip up a pot in eight seconds and then fix your boiler in the time it took them to finish a smoke. The townsfolk would sooner believe it was magic, rather than the honed science of generations, passed down through carefully-plotted Spark bloodlines.

That year, the chieftain gave his regular knock on the door--a thunderous banging that could wake the dead--and Agatha startled from where she was playing with Teodora's scales and weights.

"That's Red Gheni, don't worry," Teodora explained, and opened the door to reveal the man himself.

Despite the grandiosity of his knock, the man himself was not very tall, and more reedy than large. He had a thick bushel of a mustache, but his lower jaw was prosthetic, a piece of Sparkwork that he'd done himself, and regularly joked about, saying he could do better work with half a head than others with their skulls intact.

"Teodora, look what I have!" Red Gheni declared, brandishing the bottle of vodka for her.

"Well, come in and help me with it, then," Teodora replied, already taking out two small glasses from the cupboard.

Red Gheni grinned and walked in to set the bottle on the table, and then stopped in his tracks as he noticed Agatha looking at him from across it. She had abandoned the rows of weight and the kitchen scales in favor of waving at him shyly.

"Teodora, you've got yourself an apprentice since last time I was here!" Red Gheni observed.

"She's my granddaughter," Teodora said.

"Good idea, that. Always keep the skills in the family," Red Gheni approved.

"I meant she's not my apprentice. She's here because my son needs me to watch her for a bit," Teodora said patiently.

"Well, what, is she too young to learn?" Red Gheni asked, looking Agatha up and down, like he was inspecting a mule before deciding whether to buy it.

Teodora rolled her eyes at first, but mindful of the fact that Agatha wasn't used to Red Gheni's sense of humor, she patted Agatha's head, running fingers down her soft hair.

"She's a very smart girl, and she picks things up quickly," Teodora said. "But I don't know if she's going to be around long enough to learn everything I have to teach."

"I've been learning loads of stuff!" Agatha argued.

"Eh, see?" Red Gheni grinned. "She's got the spirit. Should talk to your son to let you keep her."

Teodora laughed, because she hadn't considered the notion, but by Red Gheni's lopsided smile, she could tell he hadn't-- _quite_ \--meant it as a joke. Her rusty chuckles tapered off, and she looked to Agatha, humming thoughtfully.

 

* * *

 

The band was camped outside town for a few days, as they sold their wares and did repairs in town. Their portable forges billowed thick plumes of smoke as they ran from morning well into the night, and the sounds of industry as they hammered and talked and laughed floated all the way to Teodora's cottage, making the woods feel alive and busy, driving back the wilderness a bit more.

Agatha, excited at the prospect of playing with other children, spent most of those days dashing through the woods with the youngest of the band and excitedly swapping stories of where they'd traveled and what they had seen. She came home with mud encrusted all the way to her knees, and Teodora made her wash her feet on the stoop before she was allowed in. Winter was approaching, and Teodora was going to have to get shoes for Agatha when the weather chilled, but that was a consideration for later, if Agatha was even going to be there that long.

From the stories Agatha told the other children, Teodora realized that Agatha had been on the road with Barry more than she'd been living under a set roof, and thus Teodora ended up turning over Red Gheni's suggestion in her head. Would it do Agatha much harm to live with her grandmother, after all? If Barry wanted to stay as well...

This was usually where Teodora cut off the thought. She'd lost her sons the day she'd killed their father, and if-- _when_ Barry came back, she'd hand Agatha over without a word. But then, Teodora couldn't help the fancies of her treacherous heart. She didn't know how lonely her life truly had been until Agatha became part of it. She was growing sentimental in her old age.

Teodora focused on the practicalities instead, and commissioned a few small bits of Sparkwork from the band, bartering eggs and medicinal draughts in exchange. There were things that she couldn't make herself, especially since she did not have access to a forge, and she was not going to go in town to trade.

After a few days, the band was gone again, moving on before they could wear out their welcome. 

Agatha was disappointed to see the children leave, but perked up when Teodora told her there were children in town as well.

"Can I play with them?" Agatha asked.

"If they venture out, you may," Teodora said. Sometimes the children did roam outside town, foraging for berries in the woods, or going to the pond in the summer to swim and fish.

"But I can't go into town?" Agatha deflated, seeing her prospects dwindle.

Teodora would have liked to say she could, and encourage her to make friends, but she was uneasy with the prospect of the heavy town gates between her and Agatha. She couldn't precisely put her finger on why, except that the few townsfolk who knew about Agatha, and had seen her, had also given Teodora narrow-eyed looks, and expressed surprise that Teodora had any family.

She didn't care for those looks they gave her. She never allowed them to leave abandoned babes on her doorstep, so she didn't see how they could play at suspicion in this case. But it wasn't as if anything she said would have the desired effect, and so she coolly answered their questions in as few words as possible, and let things lie for now.

 


	2. What Grows in the Forest

The first few times it happened, it took Teodora by surprise, and she stiffened at the sound. She should have known--because Barry mentioned it before he left--that Agatha had started heterodyning. When Teodora's boys broke through, it started the same way, but they'd not been as young as Agatha, and that sound, the tuneless droning that seemed to bend sound, was still something Teodora associated most strongly with Saturn.

She did not let Agatha see her reaction, however, which was an easy thing since whenever Agatha started heterodyning, she was usually focusing on something intensely. 

But one morning, as Agatha took out her satchel of spare parts and began setting them on the table to play with, the humming took Teodora by surprise. She hadn't been prepared for it, her mind on some recipe she was trying to recall, and she set a jar down a bit too hard, drawing Agatha's attention.

The humming stopped, and Teodora meticulously looked the jar over for cracks.

"Oh dear, I hope I didn't break it," Teodora said, keeping her eyes on the jar for a few beats longer, just so the hammering of her heart would settle. She made sure her face revealed nothing as she turned to Agatha. "My dear, would you like to fill the drinking bucket?"

Agatha brightened. They kept a covered bucket in a corner, to drink water from, and it was almost empty. And Agatha, as easily entertained as any young child, had discovered she loved operating the water pump. She hopped down from her chair, and picked up the bucket in a run as she dashed outside.

Teodora followed to watch from the doorway. Agatha was tiny enough that operating the pump was an adventure for her. The lever was set for adult height, and it stuck a bit, so she reached up to grab onto it with both hands and then kicked her feet off the ground so she was pulling it down with all her weight. This amused her greatly and she repeated the motion a few times, until the bucket was full.

"Does anything else need filling?" Agatha asked, so eager she made Teodora burst into laughter.

"No, Agatha, I'll tell you if anything does," Teodora replied, coming to bring the bucket back indoors.

 

* * *

 

With a sharpness of hearing that Teodora could only attribute to Agatha's young age, it seemed that Agatha was always aware of when other children were playing in the woods. She would then turn plaintive puppy-dog eyes to Teodora, waiting for permission to go play with them.

Most days, Teodora granted it to her, as long as Agatha promised not to stray too far. They delineated the borders by local landmarks: never so close to town that the treeline was out of sight, never so far into the woods that she was past the pond, never so far in one direction that she heard the trickle of the stream, and never so far in another that she saw the crest of the mountain.

There were other landmarks peppering the radius of Teodora's cottage. There was a grove where Teodora went to collect Trusty Maiden's Weed, and Teodora often took Agatha along, teaching her how to harvest plants. There was, a bit deeper into the forest, a half-collapsed hunter's cabin. They disagreed on whether Agatha was allowed near it; Agatha did not think it was too far from home, but Teodora knew that sometimes creatures took shelter in the rotten remains of the building, and did not want Agatha to run afoul of anything.

All on her own, Agatha found other features of the landscape that Teodora had never taken into consideration: a tree that was easy to climb, or a concealed cavern that was only obvious from a child's height.

Whenever she was out or about, Teodora had taken to checking on the emitters she'd concealed in the trees around her cottage. She'd tweaked the animal-repelling fields long ago, calibrating them so they discouraged anything too dangerous from approaching. If the setting was set too high, they tended to give humans uneasy feelings, even a sense of impending doom, that she truly did not want anyone to experience whenever they approached her home. 

Now with Agatha's presence, Teodora found herself more concerned with their maintenance. 

Agatha, for her part, showed quite the interest in the devices. Teodora took one back to the cottage to take apart and repair once, and Agatha had spent the entire time perched on a nearby chair, observing.

Clankwork wasn't Teodora's preferred work, though she had an adequate grasp of it. She preferred working with the biological whenever possible. But Agatha, despite her very basic knowledge, did appear to be more inclined towards the mechanical. She grasped the fundamentals of clockwork more quickly than those of medicine, and Teodora did not want to discourage her from this pursuit if that was what Agatha was interested in, especially since such restrictions tended to take a bad turn during breakthroughs.

The timing turned fortuitous, because a merchant of Teodora's acquaintance stopped by Teeth not long after.

Altimere arrived as they did every few months in their Krawler-class wagon, the crab-like appearance of which Agatha found both funny and intriguing, so much so that she actually ran up to it for a closer look.

The wagon pulled to a halt, its many legs skittering to a stop one by one. Altimere, up in the driver's seat, gave Agatha a curious look, and then tipped their hat.

"Hallo, little miss," they said, and then cast a look about to spot Teodora. They tipped their hat in her direction as well. "One of yours, ma'am?"

"My granddaughter," Teodora said, approaching more sedately than Agatha did. "We will be requiring some things for her."

Altimere straightened up and beamed at the prospect for business, and after cranking a lever, they jumped down, taking off their hat with a flourish so they could give a ground-sweeping bow.

"We service all customers, whether big or small!" Altimere declared, and then banged their elbow against the frame of the wagon. The side of the wagon split vertically, into doors which popped open wide to reveal the wares inside. Agatha inhaled sharply at the sight, amazed.

Well, Altimere certainly always had top-notch presentation, even when their wares were not up to the same standard. But Teodora was not looking for anything too exotic that day.

Tools hung on hooks inside the doors, and Altimere folded out shelves of other small items: watches, jewelry, small devices, miniaturized books and curiosities from abroad. 

"Look but don't touch," Teodora advised, and was met with identical stricken expressions from both Altimere and Agatha.

"Surely she can touch a little," Altimere wheedled.

Teodora sighed to herself, but Altimere was young enough that their antics were endearing.

"Alright, but don't break anything," Teodora said to Agatha, who grinned and nodded eagerly.

To prove how reliable she could be, Agatha telegraphed every motion as she carefully picked up a pocketwatch, and inspected it with a very serious expression that she perhaps stole from the adults around her.

Teodora had Altimere pull out some specific wares, in the meantime. First a notebook, its paper cheap and yellow, but its pages numerous enough. Then she pondered over writing implements, dismissing the ink and pen that Altimere offered, as well as the charcoal sticks, in favor of a few different kinds of pencils.

Once she was satisfied with the items she picked out, she went into the house and took out some banknotes from the roll she kept inside a sock in a jar. She preferred bartering whenever possible, but when she went in town, she was careful to always pay money, just to avoid any misunderstanding regarding the relative worth of goods. Plenty of merchants who passed through town didn't like bartering, either, or at least not as much as they liked the crinkle of a Pax Guilder banknote. It came in use to have money, though it worried Teodora to keep it sometimes. She didn't want to give anyone the notion that she had anything worth stealing.

Agatha was still holding the pocketwatch as Teodora paid out Altimere, and so Teodora sighed, and passed another couple of banknotes to Altimere, and then told them it was for the pocketwatch as well.

Agatha's smile was radiant. The pocketwatch, no doubt, would be in pieces by evening. Teodora still thought it was money well spent.

 

* * *

 

When the children shrieked and laughed, it bounced off the trees and echoed all the way to Teodora's cottage. She sometimes didn't even notice the noise, so used to it, but even when she did not, she knew there were children in the forest by how Agatha perked up. Like a hound hearing someone at the gate, and if the child had had a dog's ears, Teodora was certain she'd see them swivel towards the sound.

When the woods were quiet, however, Agatha kept close to her grandmother, observing and imitating in endearing attempts at being helpful. 

It stole upon Teodora in odd moments. The milkwoman would stop by once a week, with her great cow following mildly behind, and Teodora would give the woman an empty canister to fill. The milkwoman would set the canister under the cow, and turn a tap, and then they'd both prop themselves against Teodora's gate from opposite sides, exchanging gossip as the milk jug filled.

Agatha would affect a grave demeanor and lean against the fence as well, listening and nodding solemnly at points as if she understood the subjects.

The milkwoman, so old that her wrinkles seemed carved into her face as unto stone, took the entire thing in stride, and Agatha might have always been a fixture at Teodora's cottage by how the milkwoman's eyes slid right over her, unimpressed and uncaring. Teodora had no doubt, knowing the milkwoman's tongue, that she carried stories of Agatha on her next stops, to her next customers. But God forbid the milkwoman ask for unsolicited information, and so while Teodora never put forth any, no questions were forthcoming either.

Agatha seemed fittingly cowed by the milkwoman, whose dour gaze never seemed to catch on the little girl hovering at Teodora's skirts, and so never spoke to her directly. But Agatha was also always nearby when the milk delivery came, and on each occasion inched a bit closer to the cow, who was larger than a normal cow, and girded with an automated milk tap. 

Teodora did not know for certain that Agatha had ever seen a normal cow so up close before, but at any rate made sure to emphasize they did not all have blue fur and a convenient faucet for the milk.

Agatha insisted on informing Teodora that, in fact, she knew what regular cows looked like, because she'd seen them at the pasture, and then Agatha's mouth clicked shut hastily, because the town pasture was just beyond the limits of where she was allowed to roam. Teodora pretended not to have noticed.

 

* * *

 

After it rained, Teodora would often go foraging for mushrooms through the forest. Agatha would follow, carrying her own tiny basket in imitation of the one Teodora had on her arm, and with her sharp youthful eyes, she scoured the forest floor.

It was an exciting game for Agatha to find something. She did not yet reliably know the difference between the edible mushrooms and the poisonous ones, but she signaled Teodora every time she found a mushroom of any variety, and Teodora would take the opportunity to teach her.

In the shades of trees, among the roots, poking out through the dead leaves, Agatha would find more mushrooms with the enthusiasm of her youth than Teodora with her meticulous sweeps. Agatha would cut them, with the blunt little switchblade she'd been given for the task, and run to place them in Teodora's hands, where Teodora would turn them over, and point out the shape of the cap or the size or its color, and explain what it was and what use it had.

She taught Agatha first about the edible mushrooms, the harmless ones, like the gilded brittlegill that grew in abundance and tended to fill most of the space in their baskets.

But just as much, Teodora would teach her about the poisonous ones, the thin-stemmed, wickedly colorful fungi that could kill or could be made into medicine depending on preparation. They wouldn't leave these behind, because they had a use, but they would put the toxic mushrooms aside from the edible ones, in Agatha's smaller basket.

When they returned home, they would upend the baskets on the kitchen table, to sort out, and clean, and peel, and chop up, and prepare in different ways. The edible ones would be cleaned carefully, inspected a final time to ensure no toxic mushrooms had slipped by their notice, before being chopped up and cooked.

The toxic ones were prepared in different ways, each type to a different purpose, but often ending up on a drying rack or in one of Teodora's jars.

She pressed the danger of certain ingredients upon Agatha since the first day the girl got there. Teodora still watched Agatha carefully around the toxic mushrooms, and instructed her on how to wash her hands with the medicinal soap Teodora kept for this very purpose. A single moment of ill-considered fascination with exciting and dangerous material was often all that was needed for Sparks to perish at their own hands, and the danger was only amplified when the Spark was yet a child.

But Agatha proved an attentive student, and took all the warnings to heart so much, that she even pointed out when Teodora was lax in her handling of toxic substances.

It amused Teodora to be upbraided on her lassitude by a six-year-old, but it also reminded her to be a good example, and so she did not mind it at all.

 

* * *

 

Agatha did not always join Teodora on her errands, but neither strayed so terribly far from the cottage, and so one day, as Teodora was foraging for fruit and mushrooms, she paused in her task at the sound of Agatha's voice cutting clear through the air of the forest, the harmonics tugging at something in Teodora's memory.

She traced her way through the underbrush, keeping the sound of crunching leaves to a minimum as she followed the sound of Agatha's voice, and only when she was close enough to see did she hear the other voices, as well.

There were about a half dozen of them, children from town who were around Agatha's age, or at most a few years older. They didn't crowd around Agatha so much as they orbited her, jostling each other for her attention, neither getting too close into Agatha's space, nor willing to stray very far.

"No," Agatha was saying, as one of the children presented her with a stick, "it's too thin! And the wood needs to be whiter, see?" she said, peeling back a strip of bark to reveal the wood beneath which did not meet with her expectations. Her voice crackled with command that should have sounded ridiculous in her high pitch and childish tones of annoyance, yet the other children bent to it easily.

"Yes, mistress!" the child who'd offered the stick said, backing up and preparing to bolt, perhaps in search of something more to Agatha's taste.

"Agatha," Teodora called out, and just like that, the spell was broken. The children froze as if they'd been doing something wrong, halting in half a step away from a dead run, unsure if they should scatter or wait to see if they were not in trouble. Eyes went to Agatha, who did not seem the least bit concerned.

"Yes?" Agatha asked, startled enough by the interruption that the command harmonics fizzled into a scratchy uncertainty.

"Come help me carry this back to the house," Teodora requested, offering Agatha her basket.

Agatha teetered on the edge of indecision for only a moment, before she waved to the children goodbye, and ran up to Teodora to seize the basket, and hoist it over her shoulder. It was not heavy; Teodora had barely filled it half-way.

They walked towards the cottage together, and once the sounds of children's voices faded with distance, Teodora found herself finally forming a question.

"Were you playing a game?" Teodora asked.

"We were playing Minions," Agatha said, guileless and guiltless.

The alarm Teodora felt at this was a distant thing, couched in rusty recollections of her sons running around Mechanicsburg, commanding other children like masters of their own miniature world. It had been hard, then, telling apart Bill's natural charm from lessons his father had imparted. He'd not even been breaking through back then, and the children of Mechanicsburg still yielded to him as readily as the adults yielded to Saturn, a mummery of behavior too deeply ingrained in the fabric of the town to separate easily.

If this was a different thing, and yet still the same, it meant Agatha was going to have to learn lessons in responsibility that Teodora hadn't thought she'd need to present her with yet. This was a thing to nip in the bud now, though Teodora was not sure quite how to impress upon Agatha the gravity of the situation without making it seem as though Agatha had done something wrong.

It was wrong, in some ways. It would end up wrong. It would end up badly, if left unchecked.

And yet... how to say this?

"And the other children enjoy this game?" Teodora asked.

Agatha shrugged.

"They said to play it," Agatha replied, a bit defensive as she sensed Teodora's disapproval.

"Are you always the mistress and they the minions?" Teodora continued, trying not to sound overly concerned.

"Well, I'm the best at it!" Agatha said. "And they don't complain about playing the minions!"

No, they wouldn't, Teodora supposed. Not while under Agatha's sway, though who knew what they would later tell their parents, or what seed of resentment would be planted without Teodora's knowledge.

Did Agatha know the effect she was having on the children? She was scientifically inclined and very forthright about this, but did she know she was a Spark? Teodora looked at Agatha as the child skipped ahead, the basket bobbing against her back with every step, and the best idea Teodora could scrounge up in the face of this issue was to be honest, and forthright.

"Agatha, come here, child," Teodora said, gesturing for Agatha to approach.

Agatha gave Teodora a puzzled look, but rounded back just as Teodora sat down on a log, bringing their eyeline level with each other.

Yet looking Agatha in the eye, Teodora was no longer confident in what to tell her. There was a truth which, spoken aloud, had the power to change too many things, and perhaps it was too early in Agatha's breakthrough to bring this worry to her, and let Agatha grow up shaped by it.

"Do you ever play games they want to play?" Teodora asked instead.

"They asked to play this one," Agatha huffed, looking to the ground.

"I know, my dear. But you seem to enjoy it. So it is best to play games they enjoy sometimes, yes?" Teodora said gently, and Agatha looked up. "Sometimes, when people listen to you and do what you say, it becomes your responsibility to act with kindness towards them."

Agatha blinked, not quite understanding, but no longer defensive.

"I was nice..." she said, but her expression grew pensive as she thought back to something--perhaps her own conduct--and re-analyzed it.

"I'm certain you didn't mean any harm," Teodora said, "but you do have to be aware of your behavior."

Teodora rose, and they continued on their way back to the cottage. There were many long discussions stretched out before them, and as Agatha's mind and inclinations expanded every day, Teodora rather suspected those conversations were closer in the coming than even she suspected.

But for the moment, this would have to do.

 

* * *

 

There was no way to prepare for every danger the Wastelands could throw their way, but Teodora found it useful to keep an ear open and always know which direction Agatha had gone off to play.

So when the shriek echoed through the forest, a sharp wail devoid of any mirth, Teodora's first instinct was to run out the door. In her heart-rending panic, she still kept together enough of her senses to run to a trunk she had by the door, and remove a portable animal wrangling ray gun from it, before she ran out the door.

She couldn't name what wild instinct had told Teodora that Agatha was the one in danger, or that something in the forest had come for her, fang and claw, but Teodora felt it was so, and ran as quickly as she could, even though her lungs were fit to burst with the effort, and her rusty old knees jarred from the impact of each step against the ground.

She was out of breath when she found Agatha struggling in the arms of a geisterdame, close to being dragged onto the back of a giant albino spider but for the fact that Agatha was shoving at the geister's face with all the strength in her little child arms, and the geister was barking reprimands in her harsh, strange language.

Neither noticed Teodora, not when she arrived and not when she hoisted the ray gun towards them, but they did notice when the spider shuddered and then bucked. It had been leaning down close to the ground in order to allow the geister to climb it, but when it moved, it shoved the geister to the forest floor with Agatha still in her arms.

In surprise, the geister released Agatha, and looked back to the spider, betrayal written all over her face.

Agatha didn't lose a step, scrambling away and then straight towards Teodora. The geister shouted, but did not follow, as Teodora cranked a  knob on her animal wrangling ray, and the spider pinned the geister down with one of its pincers. Another turn of the knob, a scream from the geister, and the spider devoured its rider.

Agatha's face was hidden in Teodora's skirt, so at least she would not look to the gory spectacle, but Teodora did not want for Agatha to hear or know what was happening, and so she placed the ray on the ground, still pointed towards the spider, and picked Agatha up in her arms, turning back towards home.

Her arms felt heavy, the exertion of the run to find Agatha only now catching up to her. She was surprised by how long and how far she had to walk to reach the cottage, when the distance the other way had seemed both interminable and gone in a flash. But she held Agatha nonetheless, afraid to put her down.

Geisterdamen. Teodora had seen them before, placid riders passing overhead, ignoring those beneath their spider's legs. They had appeared only a few years ago, and already there were stories about geisters: that they stole children, that they made crops fail. But Teodora had not minded those stories any more than she minded the stories about herself. People always found ways to sow suspicion about those they did not understand.

How strange, Teodora thought, that now she had to worry about monsters in the woods coming for her child. That had always been a story she worried other people told about her. 

She did not like this insight.

 

* * *

 

Agatha tried to explain, in hitching breaths between sobs, what had happened, but she melted into incoherence, and so Teodora did not insist on it.

Barry had left behind fragments of explanations before he left, and though Teodora was not entirely sure of it, she tried to recall what he'd said about geisterdamen and whether he had anticipated this danger from them. But no, it was likely Barry hadn't even known; geisters roamed through isolated places, never coming near major towns, and sometimes not even close to towns as small as Teeth.

The point was moot. Teodora focused on the present where she could not change the past, and thought about the future when she could not find explanations in the present. She would devise something to deal with the geisters as well. She had time and the inclination, and with Agatha under her roof, more than ample motivation.

For now, she soothed Agatha with hot tea, sprinkled in with something calming, and that seemed to bring her down from the terror. By evening, she seemed all but back to herself, though she became clingier and more fearful before bed, and that night Agatha slept in Teodora's bed, curled up against her chest like a warm bundle.

At least Agatha slept. Teodora, for her part, found herself much too alert for most of the night, her eyes glued to the window across from them. Branches cast tendrils of shadows unnervingly similar to spider legs, and Teodora found herself listening closely to the sounds of the forest, trying to parse any danger from them.

Things shuffled around in the night: vermin scratching at the walls, night raptors screeching, beasts snuffling around to make a meal of her chickens.

Teodora heard Vasily clucking his warnings to something in the early morning, still pitch-dark, and too early for his morning wake-up call. It was probably a fox, or some other creature of the wilds, but Vasily's hostility never seemed to spill over into violence or struggle, and it was nothing Teodora hadn't heard before, so she did not think to go out and investigate.

She did not think she had to until the next morning, when she stepped out of the house and puzzled over the strange play of shadows on the ground, and then looked up to discover that, sometime during the night, a gargantuan spider web had been woven between the trees over Teodora's cottage.

She found herself pinned in place by a rising horror, trying to remember where the animal wrangling ray was, and then recalling she'd left it out in the forest, still working on the gigantic albino spider.

The same spider, Teodora noted, that emerged from the fold of crisscrossing webs, its legs plucking on the strings to create a sort of low-pitched tone.

She was still standing agape and watching the spider when it let down a string of webbing, and plopped something down at her feet.

It was the animal wrangling ray Teodora had left in the woods. The spider had brought it back to her.

Teodora picked up the item and returned inside the house. She was going to deal with this after taking a fortifying shot of vodka to settle her nerves.


	3. Spider Steps

 

"Agatha, why don't you go play outside, dear?" 

Agatha shot a contemptuous look to the door, before looking back to her grandmother with a dubious expression on her face.

Teodora tried not to sigh out loud, especially when Agatha was not entirely unjustified in her sentiments, considering what had happened to her last time she strayed too far from the house. Yet, a month of being cooped indoors was more than enough to have Teodora at wit's end.

Lacking any other sort of stimulation, Agatha's attention--and her entirely too clever hands--had grabbed onto everything else in the house. She poked through the shelves at jars she was not allowed to touch, she'd pried off a tile from the hearth to see what was beneath, she'd rifled through an old trunk and found a small repair kit Teodora had forgotten about and that Teodora would have been happy to give to Agatha, if only Agatha hadn't proceeded to use it in order to turn the cuckoo clock on the wall into a small automated toy theater. 

The loss of the cuckoo clock was tragic, but predictable. Teodora could get a new one from Altimere the next time they passed through, but she suspected any such attention-grabbing item was going to fall victim to Agatha's breakthrough.

And that was likely still happening, because although Agatha had been tinkering with disassembling mechanisms and putting them together, it still felt as though there was some great tension awaiting to snap, some greater leaps of creativity that Agatha was only now winding up to.

Teodora studied the modified cuckoo clock carefully, trying to figure out how far along and how dangerous Agatha's breakthrough was going to get, but she wondered if there was a veil of memories overlaid on current events that made Teodora focus on the wrong thing. She looked at the cobbled-together toy, and she thought of Mechanicsburg's clock, and the pantomime of the Jäger chasing a townie which marked the hour. A display which appeared in more bad taste with distance, than when she'd been there.

Yet Agatha's small creation was a more benign scenario. The clock had been split open and its innards modified in a semblance of a small throne room, with the small clump of feathers signifying the cuckoo being turned into a king--Agatha had glued a small gear to its head as crown--and a simple track laid down to move the cuckoo-king from one end of the small box to another. Turning gears made the court--composed entirely of chicken feathers Agatha had gathered from the courtyard--rise and bow as the king moved.

The entire thing had to be operated by a lever, which, out of shortage of materials, Agatha had made from a stick, and as such it tended to stick. It was Sparkwork, of sorts, far beyond what Agatha had achieved until then or what a regular child might have been able to put together, but Teodora suspected it was only the first pebble in a landslide.

Perhaps considering the circumstances, Teodora should have been happy to have Agatha indoors at all time. Yet simply because Agatha refused to leave the house, didn't mean Teodora had the same luxury. She often foraged in the woods, or went to collect Maiden's Weed and various herbs, and she almost dreaded what she'd find Agatha engaged in when she returned. One time, she'd thought Agatha had finally left the house, only to look up and find her in the rafters, fascinated by all the drying bundles up there. 

"There's walnuts!" Agatha declared, pointing to the sack that she'd not spotted until just then, wedged in a corner to dry. They were from last year.

"Yes, dear," Teodora said. "Would you like to get a few?"

Agatha perked up at this notion, and Teodora almost had a heart attack when the girl proceeded to totter along the beams towards the sacks. Teodora followed just below, arms open and ready to catch her, but Agatha arrived to the sack without incident, and began picking out walnuts, using the folded bottom of her shirt as a sack.

When she was satisfied with the number of walnuts she'd appropriated, she walked again across the beams, and Teodora could see where Agatha had climbed without the use of a ladder: she dropped from one low beam onto the top of the hearth and then climbed down through the alcove.

Once she was down, Teodora gave Agatha a hammer and set her at the table to crack walnuts.

Altimere had once offered Teodora an automatic walnut-cracking machine, and even demonstrated it for her: one poured the walnuts into one end, and then the shells were spat out along the way as the edible contents were delivered into a bowl. Teodora might have considered getting the machine, if she'd been a frailer woman with considerably more walnuts to crack.

But nothing could compare to the sheer catharsis of hitting something with a hammer, and Agatha was visibly enjoying as she cracked open each walnut, one by one. She sorted the shells in one pile and the edible centers in another with great care after each walnut she opened, and once she ran out of anything to crack, she meticulously counted out the results and offered Teodora half of the walnuts to eat.

"Thank you, my dear, but you can have them all," Teodora said, shaking her head. "You have better teeth."

"Okay," Agatha said, and stuffed an entire handful into her mouth.

Teodora had a quiet laugh at Agatha's stuffed cheeks, like an overeager squirrel, and then went to clean the shells, but Agatha rushed to pick up the more intact halves before they could be relegated to the woodpile for burning.

"What are you going to do with those?" Teodora asked.

"Dunno," Agatha shrugged. "But I like the shapes."

Teodora hummed in acknowledgment, and picked up a few intact halves of shells that Agatha had missed, putting them aside before disposing of the smaller bits.

Eventually, Teodora did find out what kind of thing Agatha had been planning for the walnut shelves. She used one of them to build a more impressive throne for the cuckoo king. 

"Where did you get the idea for this?" Teodora asked, gesturing to the toy.

"It was in one of the books. The, um... part about the Storm King and the Shiny Coalition."

"Shining Coalition," Teodora corrected automatically, before thinking back on the books Agatha had read. She couldn't recall anything on Europan history in Agatha's recent reading material. "Which book?"

Agatha bounced to her feet to fetch the book, and opened to a page which had already been marked. The book was on famous Art Sparks through history, and Teodora could scarcely remember when she'd read it last. But there was an entire chapter on Reichenbach, and his famous Storm King opera. The illustrations Agatha pointed to explained some of the prop work Reichenbach had developed for the opera, and indeed, the scene in question was the Storm King's throne room.

"Ah," Teodora said, and turned the page. The bonsai hedge maze was illustrated next, with the entirely too accurate skyline of Mechanicsburg looming in the distance, so she turned the page back. "Good work, dear," she added faintly.

Agatha beamed.

 

* * *

 

The spider was going to be a problem, Teodora suspected. 

Other than the fact that Agatha now refused to leave the house--and gave loathing looks upwards when she so much as poked her head out the door and braved the courtyard--neither had Teodora gotten any new visits from the townsfolk. At least once, Teodora had looked out the window to see some townswoman with a pinched expression do an about-face and go back into town without so much as knocking at the gate.

The spider itself had not been much of a bother. Vasily seemed perfectly fine with it, though Teodora suspected the reason for that was because the spider would devour any hostile forest creature infringing on his territory, and Vasily was perfectly happy for how this kept his chickens safe.

The spider was... it hadn't made any hostile move towards them. It went hunting on occasion, leaving its web in long-limbed strides across the ground, and then returning with a bundled victim; none of the webbed creatures were human-sized, thankfully, or Theodora knew she'd have an entirely new issue on her hands.

The weather was turning, and a crisp early autumn was very soon going to turn to winter. Teodora didn't know what the spider was going to do then, but if it didn't survive the winter, at least it was one thing she didn't have to deal with. If it did, then she was just going to cope with that one day at a time.

Until then, she gave her attention to tasks she could more readily accomplish. Agatha was going to need winter boots soon, presuming she was going to hazard the outdoors by the time the snows came. Walking everywhere barefoot was all well and good for growing children, but the winters this far up in the mountains could be merciless, and Teodora wasn't going to risk Agatha's toes.

There was a cobbler in town, who Teodora knew about because she'd once had to prepare a cure for some embarrassing malady that his wife had come to tell her about. But going into town felt especially fraught at a time like this.

Some of the merchants passing through might well have had something, but even they had begun giving her wider and wider berths since the spider made its appearance. 

No, it seemed Teodora was going to have to try her hand at cobbling something herself. With a bit of soft leather, she could probably figure out how to put together a simple pair of shoes just to last Agatha through the winter months. It was only that she didn't have appropriate material, and while sorting through old scraps, worrying over too many things at once, the criss-cross of her thoughts presented an avenue for experimentation that she had not considered before.

Which was to say, she went outside with a broom and set the ladder against the side of the house, and then, just like she was clearing cobwebs from the ceilings, she raised the broom and caught a bit of the spider's web in the bristles, pulling down a whole gob of the material.

It was a gleaming white, almost unnaturally so, and when Teodora touched it, it wasn't sticky, only very soft. How curious.

She spread out the webbing on her kitchen table, and prepared to test its properties, taking out implements and jars of ingredients, and it wasn't until Agatha handed her a pair of yarn scissors that Teodora realized she was in the middle of a fugue and had caught Agatha in it as well. The thought gave her pause only for seconds, however, before Teodora thought up a delightfully simple experiment to test the tensile strength of the webbing, that Agatha could even participate in.

With speed that collapsed time into itself, Teodora sectioned the webbing and subjected each piece to a different experiment. The back of her recipe notebook became a table of measurements and observations and annotations for future experiments, and Agatha, running between shelves and cabinets to supply Teodora with needed items, cheerfully offered her own imaginative suggestions for what to do with the webbing. Though Teodora doubted they would ever need to make a tent out of it, they brainstormed a method for creating a type of canvas out of it was both demonstrative of how much Agatha had learned from her reading, and a delightfully practical application that Teodora was looking forward to implementing.

When they ran out of webbing, Teodora returned outside with the broom, taking off another small clump, but this proved an unsatisfactory amount. Agatha, who was as taken with the experiment as Teodora, requested to climb on the roof with the yarn scissors and cut a proper length of the webbing where it hung low enough for her to reach.

The spider wasn't present to see its web vandalized, and Teodora, deep in her fugue, only had a slight twinge of apprehension about letting Agatha climb the roof, but they quickly developed a sort of safety harness out of an old sack they cut up, and a length of rope. Teodora used an old hay fork to throw the length of the rope over a high and sturdy branch extending over the roof, and tied it off on a tree trunk. Once she was sure Agatha wouldn't plunge off the roof at the slightest misstep, she sent the girl to cut off more of the web.

Agatha clambered confidently against the wooden tiles of the roof, her feet finding purchase easily, and the safety harness wasn't put to work. Agatha returned from the roof with a long length of the web--about the size of a large blanket--and a wide smile on her face. The sun managed to find a crack though the leaves and webbing, sending sunbeams down on Agatha's blond hair, turning her into a bright and wonderful creature. Teodora pinched her cheeks, and Agatha made displeased sounds at the indignity.

They returned to the kitchen table, finding new ways of breaking apart and remaking the web, developing--and sometimes abandoning--various materials in rapid succession. They found out how to turn the webbing solid like resin, soft like silk, practical like cotton, and though most methods they used were impractical to replicate on a larger scale, each idea cascaded into the next easily. Time at the kitchen table expanded, and outside the house it contracted, until they had somehow fit months of work into a long afternoon.

The sun was setting when Teodora finished sewing the last button on a pair of gray children's boots, and Agatha eagerly put them on.

"These should be good when the cold comes," Teodora said, as Agatha trotted in circles around the cottage, happy at the sounds that the stiff soles made against the wood flooring. Teodora had made sure the boots had enough room to accommodate for both a growth spurt and layers of socks in winter, so for now they had stuck a bit of fabric in the toes to fill the gap as Agatha tried them on.

Agatha proceeded to hop around the house until dinner.

 

* * *

 

When it came time for someone to finally brave the terrifying spider and approach Teodora's cottage again, it was not one of the townsfolk. Instead, it was their children.

Half a dozen of Agatha's playmates were huddled in the trees, watching with wide eyes as they sent one of their numbers ahead to try the gate. Teodora followed the terrified child's progress from a window, peering unseen through smoke-darkened drapes.

Though pale-faced and clearly chosen for this task because he lost at whatever method of selection the children employed, the little boy approached the gate and knocked on it, the way adults did when they dropped in. His small fist only made a faint sound, lost to the wind in the distance across the courtyard. Teodora only knew he'd knocked because of the motion of his hand, and the way the boy turned after a few seconds to hiss towards the other children,

"She didn't answer! She's probably not home!"

"Knock again!" one of the mouthier children hissed back. "Louder this time!"

"You come do it if you're such an expert," the boy muttered back unhappily.

The exchange was halted because Teodora appeared in the doorway just then, and all the children's eyes were on her as she approached the gate, and leaned against it to look down at the boy.

"Yes?" Teodora said, and the boy quailed.

He looked back to the other children for support, but they huddled behind trees, almost-but-not-quite out of sight and pretending they were not there. Finding no help from that direction, the boy looked like he was mentally cursing them as he turned back to Teodora.

"C-can Agatha come out and play?" the boy asked, clearly nervous.

"I'll ask if she wants to," Teodora replied.

The boy looked instantly relieved.

"Oh! So you didn't feed her to the spider?" he said, and then closed his mouth with a click, terror washing across his face as he considered that perhaps he should not have said what he did.

"That's silly, the spider doesn't eat people," Teodora replied.

"...No?"

"It would die if it tried to eat humans." It would die, Teodora didn't add, because she'd kill it herself.

"That's good!" the boy said, the edge of his nervousness smoothing over. He looked past Teodora, and actually perked up. "Hi, Agatha!" he waved.

Agatha was sitting in the doorway, and she shyly waved back.

"Agatha, do you want to go out and play?" Teodora asked, turning to the girl.

"Um." Agatha looked up to the spider, then back to Teodora. But the edge had been taken off her own fear, as well, across the length of the afternoon she'd spent working with Teodora on the webbing, and even Agatha had grown restless at being indoors so long. "Sure!" she said.

There were quiet whoops of success from the trees, where the children were still pretending they were not, and they cut off the noise by shushing each other. Agatha ran to join them.

 

* * *

 

Agatha returned mud-splattered and red-cheeked in the evening. Teodora had anticipated that Agatha might make more of a mess of herself than usual, and so she already had a few pots of hot water on the stove ready when she came in. Teodora tipped them into the bathtub, along with a bucket's load of cold water, and adjusted the temperature of the tub with another kettle's worth of hot water, readying a perfect warm bath for Agatha.

After Agatha was scrubbed clean and up in her bed on the hearth, ready for sleep but not yet sleepy, she sat with her feet dangling over the edge, braiding a length of corn silk like some of the girls from town had shown her.

"Can I walk in my boots for a bit?" Agatha asked.

"Tomorrow, dear," Teodora said. "You like your boots?"

"Uh huh."

"That spider's not so bad, is it?"

"I guess." She shrugged. "It keeps the scarier things away."

Teodora hadn't thought Agatha noticed, but she was pleased at how observant she was, for such a young girl.

"I bet," Teodora said, "that we could make other things from the webbing as well."

"Can we?" Agatha blurted out happily.

"We will have plenty of time this winter," Teodora promised.

And hopefully a breakthrough by spring, if things went well.


	4. Bosom of Winter

Winter approached in steady steps, heralded by the winds turning cold and cutting, the red and yellow of the leaves turning dark brown and brittle. Frost flowers bloomed across the glass windows, fascinating Agatha as she traced them with a finger. And when winter descended, it was like a hammer strike, sudden and all at once.

Teodora felt it deep in her bones, settling like an ache. She kept the hearth burning all through the night, and when morning came, everything was covered by a blanket of white, coming up to Teodora's knee. Agatha pushed a stool up to the window, looking excited at the prospect of playing outdoors.

Teodora prepared a light breakfast, heating up some milk for Agatha, slicing some cheese and cold meats. Agatha ate quickly, evidently planning to bolt outdoors the moment the door was even cracked open, so Teodora set out the girl's winter clothes; her boots, a pair of mittens, a thick woolen hat, an old scarf, and a sheepskin coat that was a bit too large for Agatha, and lined so thickly with wool that it made the girl's arms stick out from the sides.

When Agatha was finished eating, Teodora bundled her tightly in the thick clothing, stuffing the hat low on her head, and making sure the scarf covered her up to the nose, so that the only parts of Agatha visible was a thin crack between the bottom of the hat and the top of the scarf, for her eyes.

Agatha grumbled, but allowed herself to be encased in the cold weather apparel.

Satisfied with the end result--an almost comically rotund granddaughter, but unlikely to perish of hypothermia--Teodora pulled on her own boots, shrugged on her coat, and tied on her thickest headscarf. The day before, she had removed the shovel from the shed behind the house, and place it by the door, and so she, too, was prepared for the assault. 

The door had to be wrenched open, and as it was swung inwards, it shed snow over the wooden floor. The air was brisk, as befit a winter morning, but it smelled clean, and Teodora breathed in deeply.

Agatha scrambled out the door immediately, shrieking as she charged into the snow. It was almost up to her waist, and Teodora was thankful she'd figured out how to turn spider webbing into water-resistant material, because otherwise Agatha might well have been soaked already.

Teodora gave the snow a baleful look as she set to work on her far less enjoyable task. Each year, she felt a bit creakier, and the shovel a bit heavier. She could devise all the medicinal draughts she could, and drink them religiously, but there was no homemade cure for aging. She could only hope that her body would not fail her before Agatha was old enough to take over the more physically demanding tasks.

Just as the thought passed through her head, Teodora halted, with the shovel aloft. There she was making assumptions again; of course Agatha would not be here that long. Barry would come and take her, and Teodora would be alone again. When she breathed in again, the air did not feel cleansing for her lungs anymore, but settled around her heart with its coldness.

 

* * *

 

Agatha played clumsily in the snow, but with great enthusiasm. She piled snow for a rudimentary snowman, lost interest, and then began making square snowballs.

Teodora cleared the snow in a line from the door to the water pump, though she suspected the water was frozen in the ducts, and then cleared a path around the house to the back. Every once in a while, she took a short break, leaning hard against the shovel as she watched Agatha through the clouds of her own breath steaming on the air. 

The snow muffled all sound, making Agatha's delighted giggles and the harsh scrape of Teodora's shovel sound abnormally loud in the gray winter day. Likely the children from the town would not be able to make their way to the cottage anytime soon, so Teodora let Agatha have all the fun she could on her own. At some point, Agatha approached one of the piles of snow Teodora had made, and decided to dig into it and built a snowfort. 

Teodora chuckled to herself, and then continued digging a footpath around the back of the house, to the chicken coop. Vasily was not in sight at the moment, probably sulking inside because of the cold. Teodora knew her chickens were the hardy sort, but she had also made sure to install a small heating element in the floor of the coop, so that the enclosure would be at least marginally heated during winter.

"Grandma," Agatha called out suddenly, and Teodora turned from clearing snow off the roof of the chicken coop to see Agatha standing by the corner of the house, her cheeks flushed pink where the scarf had fallen a bit loose to reveal them.

"What is it, dear?" Teodora gestured for Agatha to approach.

Agatha trotted up obediently, and Teodora started tightening the scarf for her; she'd made the  knot around the back when she'd dressed Agatha, and the girl likely couldn't reach it herself in the cumbersome coat.

"Grandma, the chickens need scarves!" Agatha declared gravely.

Teodora paused for only a moment in her ministrations, before understanding Agatha's worries and chuckling. Teodora's chickens were Transylvanian Bare-Necks, and true to name, the skin of their necks was devoid of feathers, instead being a sort of rough red skin. She'd been worried this meant they were more sensitive to cold, too, at first, but after a few years, Teodora couldn't tell if they were truly any more at risk than regular chickens. She'd certainly never had one perish in winter until now.

"Their necks are going to be cold!" Agatha insisted, growing yet more serious in the face of Teodora's mirth.

"Of course, dear," Teodora nodded, settling her face along more serious lines as well. "Perhaps we should go back inside and make something for them."

Agatha brightened at the prospect, and turned around to tromp back indoors.

Though Teodora had not managed to clear out the entire courtyard, she left it for now, and decided to go inside as well. The roof, thankfully, was only sparsely covered by snow, because the web above had caught most of it, and then the spider had shaken it off, and down onto the side furthest from the house. Some of it had fallen past the fence, thankfully, but most of it had piled over it, swallowing up the fence under a mountainous mound.

The spider was out of sight, leaving the web to look like a giant white tarp over the house. Teodora hoped it wasn't dead, though the fact that it had cleaned the web meant that it had to be still alive. Still, she had no idea how well a creature like that endured winter.

Teodora returned indoors and spent a little time helping Agatha create scarves and tiny coats for the chickens, before she went back out to clear the yard.

 

* * *

 

Evening came quickly, a gray afternoon turning to bleached sunless sunset as clouds hung heavy in the sky, and then a deep, fathomless night. But the inside of the cottage was warm, and tinged in honey-orange from the lamps and the open hearth hatch. Firelight flickered playfully in a long swathe across the floorboards and the striped rugs, as Teodora fed bits of kindling, twigs and nut shells into it.

"It's snowing again!" Agatha declared, pointing to the window. The windows of the cottage may well have been black squares, with how deep the night was outside, but large, feathery snowflakes brushed against the glass, catching the light and then disappearing again.

Teodora was annoyed at the thought of having to get up the next day and undig the household from under yet another layer of snow, but she knew her task would only have been harder if she let more than one layer of snow build up.

"You'll have more snow to play in tomorrow," Teodora said, instead. "Come to bed now, dear."

Teodora helped Agatha up to her alcove over the hearth, and then set a chair next to the hearth to climb up at well. During winter, the cottage always got very cold during the night, but as long as she kept the fire going, it would be warm on top of the hearth. 

Sure enough, the space was a cozy bubble of warmth in the otherwise frigid air, and Agatha snuggled against Teodora. Holding the child was like having a bottle of hot water pressed against her; if anything, Teodora mused, they risked over-heating. She still pulled an extra blanket on top, just to be sure. The warmth would do her aching bones good.

 

* * *

 

The layer of snow was perhaps a hand's width, nothing like the plush blanket of the previous day. The clouds had also cleared since the day before, and the sunlight reflected merrily gold off the uneven snow. At least there was less to clear now.

Agatha flattened a path as she went ahead, eager to find the chickens and present them with their winter gear. Teodora was looking forward to seeing how Vasily was going to put up with getting bundled like a lap dog. But as they turned the corner, Teodora put a hand on Agatha's shoulder, and pulled her up short.

"Agatha, go back into the house," Teodora said.

"But I just came out!" Agatha pouted.

"Only for a minute, I'll let you know when to come out again," Teodora promised.

Agatha turned towards Teodora, her face perhaps drawn in confusion, but not visible through her scarf. However, sensing that there was something amiss, Agatha nodded, and turned to walk back inside.

Teodora hefted the shovel with both hands, and walked slowly closer to the disturbed snow she'd spotted. Up close, she could more clearly see that they were footprints. The creature had climbed over the nearby fence, and made for the tool shed tucked up against the side of the cottage, next to the covered wood pile.

There was the arc of tamped down snow where the shed door had been opened, and also a couple of stray drops of blood, not fresh, but staining the snow like flecks of rust.

The footprints had not looked like the soles of any shoes, but more like paws. Not from any beast she recognized, and certainly no mere animal would open the shed door and then pull it closed after themselves. Sadly, this was not the first time Teodora's shed had served as shelter to some stray.

She knocked gently on the door.

"Still alive in there?" she asked in her friendliest voice possible.

She listened intently, and the day was so silent, that she could hear the imperceptible shuffling from inside. She waited.

"I have hot milk inside, if you'd like some," she said. Not precisely, but she could heat it up on the stove quick enough. "Or something else, if milk doesn't sit right with your stomach."

There was a stretch of silence, and Teodora ascribed deliberation to it, though for all she knew, whatever was inside only prepared to attack her. But as she listened closely, there was a rustle, a slow shuffle of feet.

The door cracked open an inch, and a round eye--black iris and black sclera--peered out at her from inside the shed.

 

* * *

 

Abernathy was some kind of hedgehog construct, the hair along his head fused into rudimentary spikes, and going down his back in a jagged stripe that tattered his shirt collar. He sniffed the offered food suspiciously, but then ate ravenously as his hunger overwrote his caution.

Agatha sat across from him at the table, swinging her feet as she drank a mug of hot milk. Abernathy was making his way through a bowl of porridge, a bit too fast for Teodora's liking. She didn't know when he had last eaten, so she did not give him too large of a portion out of fear of making him sick, but she did also cut up a small wrinkled apple from her cold stores, slicing it for him, and he ate that just as ravenously.

This happened every winter; one or two lost souls who found shelter along her walls. When the weather was warmer, they perhaps slept in the woods, in tree hollows, in caves, on the moss. But winter so far up in the mountains was unforgiving, cutting to the bone. Warmth drew them to places they would have otherwise avoided.

Abernathy's feet were bare of shoes, but wrapped in rags. He hadn't lost any toes, but Teodora also didn't like the blue tinge his extremities retained. Along his forearm, he had tied a bandage, now stained a dark, dry rust red. He would not let Teodora approach or even look too long at his injured arm.

"If you were going towards the town," Teodora said, "it's perhaps not the best place for a construct."

"No, no towns," Abernathy spoke laboriously through a mouth that was almost human-shaped but missed the mark by just enough to stifle words. 

"Do you know the area?" Teodora asked.

Abernathy hesitated, perhaps looking for traps in the words, but then shook his head, his long ears flattening against his skull.

"I can give you directions, though it's dangerous to travel in winter around these parts. Spring would be safer."

"No, not spring," Abernathy shook his head again, eyes widening. "I should... go now."

So, that probably meant there was someone coming to look for him. Teodora expected as much--one did not travel in this weather out of an excess of options--but she smiled kindly nonetheless.

Agatha gasped in worry.

"But it's cold!" she argued, and then pointed to Abernathy's feet. "And you don't have any shoes!"

Abernathy twitched, as leery of kindness as of a raised hand, and his eyes swept across the room uncertainly.

"You can spend the night," Teodora offered as compromise, and Abernathy looked marginally relieved, nodding in agreement.

 

* * *

 

An air of anxiety hung through the house for the rest of the day. Agatha, focused on the task of coming up with shoes to fit paw-like feet, did not seem to notice it, but Teodora, even as she sat to catch up on some sewing, couldn't help but notice Abernathy's tics and fidgeting. His ears were not fully mobile, but twitched up and down with every crunch of snow from outside. He drummed his fingers over his knees nervously, and rubbed them along the seams of his ratty trousers, and Teodora was beginning to regret not letting him leave when he wanted to.

As evening approached, she ceded her bed to Abernathy, as she climbed up to sleep with Agatha on the hearth. After a long day of concentrated fretting, it seemed his energy was flagging, and his eyes were half-lidded as he nodded thanks to Teodora and climbed under the sheets.

Teodora lay awake for most of the night, anyway, straining at every sound as Abernathy had during the day. Her suspicion was perhaps unfair, but she had not survived so long by being unwary. 

But eventually, the warmth and the lack of any suspicious noises lulled Teodora into sleep, and consciousness slipped away in the cold, pitch-black hours of early morning, just as the fire in the hearth guttered out.

 

* * *

 

Teodora looked at the ransacked pantry and sighed. Abernathy had stuffed as much as he could carry into a sack, but only things that could be readily eaten. He had not taken the grain flour or the cornmeal, though he'd knocked over a sack and spilled white across the floor. He'd pillaged all the dried meat, dried fruit and shelf-stable biscuits Teodora had, instead. The walnuts, the one jar of jam she kept within easy reach, though not the butter. A half loaf of bread. All the cheese.

She checked on the cold storage to make sure he hadn't hit it as well, but that was in a cellar. A heavy trap door and a steep ladder led into a cramped, lightless room where Teodora kept a small crate of foraged foodstuff--mostly wrinkly little wild apples, dried mushrooms, herbs and such--and the walls of the room were laden with jars of pickled and preserved goods, smoked meat and other things that kept better in the cold. Abernathy had seen her go down into it, but had apparently not risked the heavy, noisy door to try to steal anything from there. 

Agatha was waiting with a stricken expression as Teodora climbed up from the frigid cellar and flipped the door closed.

"I thought he was nice," Agatha muttered.

"He was desperate," Teodora said, carefully neutral, though she couldn't imagine why Agatha had thought he was nice. He'd been nothing but a bundle of nerves the entire time, and too distracted by his own terror to engage with Agatha when the girl tried to ask questions.

But the girl was kind-hearted, and tried to make shoes for him, and didn't take his brusque answers to heart.

And now she was disappointed.

"He stole from us! That's mean!" Agatha declared, pushing her bottom lip out. In any other situation, that pout would have been endearing, but Teodora knew her sense of betrayal was very real in this case, and justified.

"It is," Teodora agreed, "especially since we would have helped him if he had asked." And not made as much of a mess, either, Teodora thought, as she took out a broom to sweep up the flour. "But when people are afraid--when they are in trouble--they may think that asking for any help will make them too vulnerable. There are too many people in the world who would take advantage of someone who is in trouble."

Agatha thought on this for a moment, her face now twisting in an offended mien.

"But that's awful! People shouldn't do that! If someone's in trouble, they should help!" Agatha said.

"They should," Teodora agreed, "yet often they do not. If people take advantage of you even once, you begin looking at the world differently. As if anyone may betray you. It's a loss of... innocence."

Teodora's motions slowed as she spoke, and she looked to the lines of flour the broom bristles had traced over the wooden floorboards, the flour now grayed by dirt. One day, Agatha would lose that innocence as well, if she had not now. Better to gird her against the harshness of the world than to lie to her, but Teodora had no taste for speeding along the process.

She shook off those thoughts, and Agatha wandered off, apparently with her own deep thoughts to consider. Agatha sat down in the reading chair with the Wasteland Almanac open on her lap, but Teodora could see by Agatha's fixed stare that she wasn't truly reading.

 

* * *

 

The next day, two Wulfenbach soldiers knocked at Teodora's gate.

Leery of strangers, but suspecting what their errand might be, Teodora allowed them entry. The younger was a curly-haired woman, with a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks even in winter. Her nose was red as she sniffed miserably and accepted a cup of hot tea from Teodora. The other, her superior officer, was a middle-aged man, and had a Tatar look about him.

They were looking for Abernathy.

"He's not in trouble," the older officer said, waving off the offer of tea from Teodora. "Well, not in trouble with us, at any rate. His old Spark master made some unreasonable demands of the neighbors, and the Wulfenbach Empire got called in to sort things out."

"We got magpie-squirrels set on us!" the young woman-soldier piped, pointing to still-fading scratches on one of her cheeks. "Nasty things!"

"Got it sorted," the older officer said firmly. "But some of the Spark's constructs scattered before the Empire could make arrangements for them. In the bosom of winter, no less. Abernathy's one we haven't tracked yet."

"I see," Teodora said curtly, but volunteered no further information.

Agatha was peering at the two soldiers curiously, and the older one caught her eye, putting two fingers to the brim of his hat in a brief salute.

"Don't suppose you've seen anyone strange around here, little miss?" the soldier asked kindly.

Agatha's eyes darted to Teodora, then back to the soldier.

The younger woman leaned over to Agatha with a sickly-sweet smile plastered across her face, too cloying and too fake to be reassuring.

"Oh, you must be such an observant little girl! You'd tell us if you'd seen anything, wouldn't you?" the young soldier asked in the condescending voice used by people who didn't know how to address children.

Agatha drew back. Where the older soldier's inquiry had been friendly, the woman's insincerity instead made Agatha's guard go up. The older officer gave a sigh as he realized how poorly his companion played off his cue.

"I dunno," Agatha said with a shrug, and turned to wander back to her toys, scattered over her playing rug conveniently at the other side of the house.

"And you, ma'am?" the older soldier asked, giving Teodora a penetrating look.

Teodora, never one to be cowed in her own house, gave a firm shake of the head.

"Perhaps somebody in town has seen something," she suggested instead.

"Perhaps," the older soldier said dubiously, holding Teodora's gaze. She did not blink, and he looked away first. "Well, let's go," he addressed his fellow soldier.

The soldier woman downed her cup of tea, and got up to follow.

Teodora watched them from her window as they passed through the gate, listening to the drift of their voices.

"Oh, but now I have to pee!" the younger soldier complained.

"Shouldn't have had that tea!" the older one replied, exasperated.

"Suppose she'd let us use her outhouse?"

Teodora couldn't hear the muffled reply, as the two soldiers were already disappearing down the path and into the treeline.

"Are Wulfenbach soldiers good people, Grandma?" Agatha asked.

"That's a complicated answer," Teodora said. "Hopefully we will never need confirmation."


	5. Snowbells of Spring

One day, Agatha ran inside holding something in her small fist.

"Grandma, look!"

The girl handed over a small bundle of snowbells, the flowers so tiny and frail that their stems had been bruised by Agatha's grip. But their bowed heads were white as freshly-laid snow, and shivering at the slightest motions, delicate things that they were.

"That means spring's here, right?" Agatha asked very seriously.

"Nearly so," Teodora said, and took the bundle of flowers. She filled a small cup with water and put the bundle of snowbells in it, placing this miniature flower vase on the kitchen table. "Best leave any other snowbells you see in place, so other people will know as well."

"Oh. I just brought you these because the other children were picking some for their mommas, but okay!"

Then, with her cheeks still flushed from the exertion, Agatha ran back outside, where the bright whoops of joy that met her signified that her friends from town were also there.

Teodora sat at the table across from the tiny snowbells, dunking a hard biscuit into hot milk and nibbling on it thoughtfully. Spring may well be a long way away yet, especially this far up the mountains, but it had not snowed in a week, and the bright sunlight had begun eating away at the snow. 

The other day, Teodora had gone round the house with a broom to break off the icicles off the edge of the roof and the waterspout before they could fall and injure Agatha. The muffled air of winter and its frozen stillness had been replaced with the sound of trickling water, of icicles crashing deep in the forest and echoing, and echoing, and echoing. Up in the webs above the house, Teodora had seen the spider's first motions, the shadows of pincers moving about and correcting holes in the web, like a villager replacing missing shingles after the snows had sloughed off the roof.

Spring was always brief, but one of the busiest time of the year nonetheless. Teodora finished her biscuit, drained the last of her milk as it was cooling off, and then got up, ready to tackle the chores of another year.

 

* * *

 

Day by day, sunny morning by sunny morning, the snows receded. The smell of wet wood rot and fresh grass began filling the forest again, as the crumpled, blackened layer of leaves emerged from the white expanses that had once covered them. The roads were easier to travel, and saw use again as the mountain passes opened. Brief floods plagued neighboring towns--or at least for a given value of neighboring, considering the distances involved--not hitting Teeth itself, but washing down the other side of the mountain and all the way to the lowlands.

And where the snows melted away, they left behind mud.

The courtyard had become a mess of puddles and soft, clinging earth. Teodora had placed stepping stones for just such an eventuality, but that still left most of the courtyard a mess. Agatha hopped from stone to stone as instructed, enthralled by the game of it more than out of obedience, but once outside the confines of the carefully arranged courtyard, she trampled all across the forest and its muddy, unpaved footpaths, and came home caked with half the forest floor.

Each day Teodora sat on the threshold with a dull knife she usually used as a gardening trowel, and a basin of water, and she scraped and scraped and scraped at the mud on Agatha's booths: great thick layers of it, black and brown, tinged with moss-green, in patches both wet and dry as Agatha had traveled the woods and collected it in waves. Teodora scraped it off in viscous globs, and where it was too dry, she dipped the boot in the basin of water, and then she scraped once again.

She was sitting right there, engaged in the very task, and had just scraped the knife against the threshold's edge to slick off its own layer of mud, when she heard the nicker and chug of a horse and wagon.

The roads being open meant the first of the merchants would be coming through. Teodora had done inventory of the winter stores, and had come up quite short in food, though not tragically so. She would have to start planting her garden soon, but until then, stocking up would be preferable. There was still time for unseasonably late frosts until summer; a mountain spring was often short, and frequently deceptive.

The merchant caravan took the road just off Teodora's cottage, and perhaps it was not one that had passed through there before, because nobody came to Teodora's cottage. But she heard them through the trees, half a dozen voices, in good cheer, though one was telling a runner to go scout the town ahead and make sure it was safe.

Teodora went inside, picking up her basket, and taking a roll of banknotes to stuff into the inside pocket of her winter coat. Then she went around to her shelves, taking off a couple of salves and small bottles of medicines she'd brewed over the winter, and the last tin of Trusty Maiden's Weed she had left over since the previous year. Medicine was always good to trade, though commonly one had to trust the person doing the trading. Just in case they wouldn't trade for home-brewed medicine, Teodora also took with her a bolt of cloth she'd made from the spider webbing. It was like silk, both soft and extremely hard to damage, and it also had some thermal properties that Teodora thought would interest some more specialized Sparks. A merchant spreading the word about the material would likely send others to her doorstep as well, and she was not entirely opposed to making a small profit, now that she had a child in her care.

The merchant caravan had found a clearing, and was setting down camp when Teodora emerged from the forest.

Long experience told Teodora just by sight that this caravan was small, but respectable. The kind of family operation that didn't go borrowing trouble, though if they had been, then Teodora had a small ray gun stashed in a pocket, and any number of other devices along the seams of her coat.

As the clearing bustled with the rush of people setting up camp, quick and efficient with long practice, the lookouts spotted Teodora, and stopped her right at the edge of the treeline.

"Traveling across the mountains?" Teodora asked.

The caravan master--because that was probably who the man holding a ledger and frowning into it was--approached her then. His hairline was receding, but it was clear he was not past his prime yet. His arms were thick, emerging from a furry vest to be barely contained by the sleeves of his shirt.

"We're merchants," the man said curtly. "Roads here are free, far as we know."

"Have any food to trade?" Teodora asked, and at this, the man brightened. 

"You from town?" he asked, still cautious, despite Teodora's stated intentions.

"From just outside town," Teodora said, and gestured over her shoulder. "My house is just over this hillock and through the trees."

"We-ellll," the caravan master said, "we have plenty to trade, yes." He made a sharp hand sign to someone. A young woman, perhaps half the caravan master's age and sharing enough of his looks that they were undoubtedly family, peeled off from the bustle to stand next to him. She looked Teodora up and down, wary, before grunting for Teodora to follow.

Around the back of one wagon, barely open but filled to the ceiling with chests, boxes, baskets and bundles, the young woman began pulling out and setting down a variety of goods. Teodora picked out a sack of good quality white flour, knowing that she was down only to cornmeal, which she made into polenta by the local custom but did not particularly enjoy eating. She was of a mind to make some bread. A variety of dried goods followed: fruit and smoked meat, hard biscuits. Some pickled fish and a quarter-wheel of smelly cheese from far away also made the cut. The caravan had nothing too fresh to trade, not this early into spring, but Teodora only wanted a little something to tide them over for a few months, before the chickens started laying more eggs and the vegetable garden had time to bloom.

Teodora handed over a few banknotes to the young woman, who counted them with a frown. If the exchange rate had changed all that much over winter, it was good that Teodora had also brought things to trade.

"The Wulfenbach Empire trades in Pax Guilders now," the young woman informed Teodora.

"Do they?" Teodora asked. "Is that where you're headed?"

The woman gave a rueful smile.

"That's where we are, auntie," she replied. "This whole territory is Wulfenbach land now. Haven't you seen any of the soldiers come through? Or dirigibles overhead?"

Teodora had seen both, but hadn't given either much credence. A town was only a speck of civilization, its existence constantly negotiated with the wilds and their horrors. Whatever lines an empire drew on a map didn't tend to affect lives here much. Except at times like these.

"Could I trade for some Pax Guilders?" Teodora asked instead. 

"What've you got?" the woman asked cautiously.

Teodora showed her the salves and home remedies, for some fairly common ailments, so they wouldn't have fetched much of a price either way, and then the Trusty Maiden's Weed, which was more readily recognizable and always in demand. But the young woman's eyes lit up in interest at the bolt of fabric that Teodora unspooled for her, hands passing over the cloth in wonder.

"Would you mind if I had the caravan seamstress have a look at this?" the woman asked, turning the fabric over. It was a warm white on one side, but a metallic gray on the other, and the texture was different from anything even a merchant might have had passing through their hands.

"It's Sparkwork," Teodora said, leery of revealing this, but knowing she ought to before it became a point of contention.

"Oh, and wonderful work it is," the woman agreed. "Our seamstress is a Spark as well, it's why I'm sure she'll find it of interest."

Teodora agreed, and once the seamstress arrived, then the real haggling began.

In the end, Teodora walked away with a stack of Pax Guilders and a full basket, along with the assurance that she would find many more buyers for her work if she ever had more to sell.

 

* * *

 

As the mud dried and hardened, and the slats of the fence were fixed, and the outside of the cottage mended where winter had taken its bite, Teodora found herself staring down the barrel of the inevitable spring cleaning she would have to engage in.

Hauling out the rugs and thick blankets became a bit more tiring every year, but as she set them over the fence, she handed the carpet beater to Agatha instead. Agatha accepted the strange implement with some bewilderment; it was wood and wicker, a solid pole ending in a flat head like a shovel braided out of branches.

Teodora patiently explained the use of the item, and after a few hesitant false starts, Agatha unleashed herself unto the rugs with an energy that far outstripped her actual upper body strength--but at least she beat the carpets with enthusiasm, if nothing else, and they shed small clouds of dust into the air with every smack of Agatha's carpet beater.

Amused by the sight, Teodora sat and observed for a while, before her eyes followed a cloud of dust upwards and her line of sight settled on the middle-distance.

Spring had arrived in earnest now; the trees were heavy with the belligerent chirping of too many birds, and the sun actually warmed the air, though the earth still held a chill.

But spring had arrived, and Barry had not, and now Teodora could see stretched before her years, and springs, and winters once again in which Barry would still not return. A terrible mother's premonition held its grip around Teodora's heart; not true clairvoyance, but the accumulated experience of many years and the subconscious parsing of small indicators into a cohesive conclusion: she may very well never see Barry again. The air smelled wet and fresh, and as raw as her grief.

She ought to go find him, perhaps, if not for her greater duty towards Agatha. The trail would be long since cold by the time Teodora considered Agatha old enough to take along on such a journey, and so by that point, Teodora would also be older, and far more feeble than she already was.

Whatever path Barry had taken had decided the course of action for everyone else in his family as well. And the fear--the eternal fear in Teodora's breast--had always been that all roads would always lead back to Mechanicsburg. With a Heterodyne in tow, there was a tragic inevitability that any trip Teodora undertook would end there anyway.

No, Teodora decided. She would be selfish for many more years yet, and keep Agatha all to herself. Damn Mechanicsburg, and their hunger for a madman to hang their loyalty onto. She would not let Agatha become their idol to worship. Let them eat themselves alive as they waited for another Heterodyne; Teodora was only too happy to leave them disappointed.

Teodora rose eventually, and as Agatha tired herself out, she took the carpet beater and smacked the carpets in earnest, with her full adult strength. Dust poured out in thick clouds now, as the carpets were beaten into submission. Teodora was old, but she had strength of arms yet. Heavens knew she'd need it.


End file.
